Showtime Road Rule
With Showtime you can crash anywhere and any time you want, even when doing an event, effectively turning any stretch of road you like into a Crash Junction. Just hold both the left and right shoulder buttons at the same time while driving to turn your car into what amounts to be a considerable crashing conundrum of crazy carnage. The goal of Showtime is to do as much damage as possible to the traffic driving around Paradise City. The value of the damage you cause and the distance of the showtime are recorded as your score for the event. If you beat the set Road Rule for showtime, you are halfway to ruling that road. Ground Break While in Showtime mode you can bounce your car into the air using the boost button to Ground Break. Press this button while your car is touching the ground and you will be launched upwards. While airborne the vehicle can be controlled with the steering joystick - left and right move your car in that direction, while pushing forward accelerates, and pulling backward slows the vehicle down and eventually reverses your direction. Hard-left and hard-right movement can be achieved using the LB and RB buttons respectively for the Xbox 360. For PlayStation 3 users, the sharp turns and acceleration and deceleration are defaulted to the six-axis tilt function. Boost Each time you Ground Break you use a small amount of boost, and when you run out of boost the Showtime event is over. However, destroying other cars in a violent collision adds a small amount of boost, and for every 10 cars a larger amount of boost is awarded. To keep the bar filled (and therefore keep the event going longer) you need to keep hitting as many vehicles as you can. Boost will also start to drain if the player's car is left stationary for more than a few seconds, so it is important to keep moving and crashing cars all the time to avoid a premature end to the event. Each Ground Break appears to use more boost as you crash more and more cars. The amount of boost awarded at 10-car intervals also decreases each time and after around 100-120 cars it becomes difficult to keep boost full even in very dense traffic. Scoring There are a number of different ways to accumulate your score in a Showtime event. Collisions Colliding with a vehicle adds the value of the damage to the event's score. Each type of vehicle is worth differing amounts and usually bigger is better. The value of a vehicle is shown floating above the top of it, although since controlling Ground Break's jump height is somewhat random the best strategy is simply to go for the nearest car without worrying if a higher value vehicle is also available. As the event progresses the vehicles appear to become more proficient at avoiding you and take more extreme evasive maneuvers becomes more important. Collision Combos Pushing a vehicle into another one will result in a x2 combo multiplier for the value of the damage done in that collision. If these vehicles hit another car a x3 combo multiplier is applied to the total damage in the collision, and so on. Again, because of the imprecise nature of controlling Ground Break the best approach is to aim to hit the most number of cars possible without attempting to deliberately score combo multipliers. Road Signs and Billboards Hitting an overhead road sign or Burnout Billboard will add $10,000 to your score. It is generally not worth aiming for these and missing the traffic as you don't get any boost refill, and the score can easily be replaced by hitting 3-4 normal vehicles instead. Distance Traveled At the end of the event you will be rewarded for total distanced traveled. $100 is awarded for every yard, which is then multiplied at the end along with the rest of your score. This is a very lucrative method of gaining points and can easily equal up to 75% of the points scored in collisions. In general you should be aiming for a balance between crashing cars and traveling as far as possible. If you miss a vehicle simply continue to the next one rather than spend precious boost slowing down and going back for it. If you miss a bus, however, it may well be worth going back for the multiplier (described below) as this could make a big difference at the end of the event. Bonus Multiplier Colliding with buses adds to a multiplier bonus which is applied to the final damage score. The bonus multiplier, along with distance traveled are the key to getting the highest scores. Unfortunately it is somewhat random as to when buses appear, but they seem to be more frequent on the country roads on the west of the map. This is probably to compensate for the fact there are less cars on the road than in the city areas. Whenever you see a bus you should make it your primary target as the multiplier makes it very valuable. The Collision Combo effect can also be used to take a bus down - knocking another car into it still adds to the multiplier even if you didn't hit the bus yourself. Car Selection Because your boost bar is your "life bar", Aggression boost vehicles are the ones to go for as they have the biggest bars to fill and also get the biggest boost award when doing damage to other cars. Just as useful is picking a large car; the more road you take up the more vehicles you're likely to hit, although this will also affect maneuverability while in the air. Strategy *When you start a Showtime event on a smaller road make sure you're very near the intersection with a bigger road. Once you start Showtime you can go anywhere you can reach, including different streets, and it will still score you for the road you started on. This is great for roads that don't see much traffic, but are connected to the main roads like E. Crawford. *There are many buses in Silver Lake so scoring a multi-million score is easier. *In general make sure you're always on the Oncoming side of the road. Because you'll have a faster relative speed to the traffic you'll have more opportunities per second than if you're going with the flow of traffic. It will also give the oncoming traffic less time to react and increase your chance of hitting them. *Try to cover as much distance as possible during the event - this can easily account for an extra 50-75% of your score on top of the damage done to vehicles. On a good run hitting 70-80 cars you can travel around 1,000-1,500 yards which, if you assume a 5 times multiplier, is worth around 500,000 points! *Make sure you hit all buses that you see, including those traveling in the same direction as you. If you see one crossing an intersection ahead of you consider following it. *Try to avoid tunnels and anything with a roof over it. Ground Break in these areas will bounce you back downwards off the ceiling and will make it hard to control the car's movement. * A typical multi-million score would consist of: :*80-100 cars destroyed :*$250,000-$300,000 collision damage :*1,500 yards travel distance :*x5 bonus multiplier from buses :*final score = around $2,000,000